Le Divorce (2003)

Fresh and Exciting

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

NO ONE in this film over the age of 5 fails to horrify. In a variety of ways of course. I kept thinking of words like "Vile" or "Stupid". As a conventional film entertainment, I give it a 1. As an incisive critique, it deserves an 8.But, of course.My takeaway was that this was a brilliant dissection of the French and American upper classes as they interacted. Both were vile and a disgrace to the best aspirations of most civilizations of the past 500 years.If you wrote down on a set of tickets every human weakness you could think of and put them all in a little jar, then pulled them out one by one, you could find an example of each (very well acted) in this movie.I liken it to a very well done Army training film on venereal disease. Professionally done but, disgusting. If this was the intent of the writer/director then they deserve an 10! "A sickly sourness filled the room. The bitter harvest of a dying bloom"* Finally, seeing it so many years later while France is collapsing in a self-induced cultural suicide...it has a sort of historical sting. You can see why French "Elites" have wrecked their country. Self-involvement, decadence and cynical detachment have reached full bloom.It couldn't happen to a more deserving people. I just hope America doesn't go completely over the cultural/moral brink that the French are living out as I write this.But, of course...*Peter Gabriel

I was surprised to find that this was marketed as a romantic comedy. I didn't see much romance and I didn't see any comedy. I'd classify it as a drama, albeit a very melodramatic and tiresome one. With characters that I didn't care for or about. The most positive feeling I had for any character was apathy. I expected better based on the actors involved in the project. The only good things were the few shots of the food in the restaurant, which at first seemed over the top but later seemed to be a saving grace of the movie, and the Paris scenery. Those two things alone warranted the rating but I'd much rather have just watched a travel show. It's just a shame I watched it on TV so I couldn't ask for my money back.

Le Divorce (2003) is not by any stretch a very good movie. But is it - as a stunning number of IMDb subscribers have dubbed it - "the worst movie ever made"? Very far from it I'd say, but then I've seen a ton of real clunkers in over five decades of obsessive movie viewing. While Le Divorce has more than its fair share of implausible and languorous moments, I nevertheless managed to stay reasonably awake and entertained throughout.The heavily negative response the film received from American reviewers and on this film site has perhaps less to do with the film's merits (or lack thereof) than with the misleading way it was marketed and to the casting of Kate Hudson in its lead role. Though limited in acting range, Ms. Hudson is blessed with her mother Goldie's winning smile and a screen-persona tailor-made for light comedy. In Le Divorce she seems to have stumbled into an alternate universe, and no doubt her many fans felt the same way upon viewing the film.However it might be classified (and I'm not sure how that might be), Le Divorce is clearly NOT a romantic comedy geared to the tastes of teens and twenty-somethings. It's probably better not to think of it as a romantic comedy at all - at least not in the usual American sense of a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets girl plot with a heavy admixture of screwball humor to keep the patrons amused. Quite to the contrary, Le Divorce includes scenes of attempted suicide, stalking, hostage taking, and murder. And these are not handled with humor - screwball, black, or any other form. They are staged with at times all too much seriousness.Also, "the boy" in the romantic formula turns out to be a notorious 55 year old French sophisticate/philanderer named Edgar Cosset (Thierry Lhermitte) whose M.O. for the conduct of extra-marital affairs includes the gift of an expensive Hermes "Kelly bag" at the start of a relationship and a stylish scarf at its end. One of the running jokes in Le Divorce (admittedly not a belly-whopper) is that every woman in Paris seems to recognize Edgar's seduction methods and instruments except his latest flame, a visiting American ingénue, Isabel Walker (Hudson). Nor does the Edgar-Isabel plot have a happy ending in the manner of Gigi, a film referenced by Le Divorce through the casting of Leslie Caron in a well-done supporting role.There is no reconciliation to be found in Le Divorce between American post-feminist romantic idealism and French double-standard patriarchy and sexual cynicism. These are two worlds that do not comprehend each other, and never the twain shall meet- well, hardly ever. The film's other romantic plot involving Isabel's older sister, the pregnant poet Roxanne (Naomi Watts) does provide us with a somewhat conventional romantic resolution, by uniting Roxanne not with her divorce-seeking, two-timing French husband (who ends up precipitously and conveniently dead) but with the sympathetic lawyer she hires to represent her in an increasingly ugly property battle with her in-laws. By the time this happens, however, "le divorce" has been relegated to the background, and "l'affaire" between Isabel and Edgar has moved to central prominence in the screenplay.Naomi Watts is a great actress, but Le Divorce is clearly not her finest moment. Her role is by turns over-the-top dramatically (her poetry reading scene and subsequent suicide-attempt) and underwritten (she practically disappears in the last third of the film). The rest of Le Divorce's cast includes some very good actors like Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Stockard Channing, Stephen Fry, Matthew Modine, and the aforementioned Leslie Caron. Other than Caron, the only one of these who is given much to do is Modine. And that turns out to be quite unfortunate since the mad betrayed-husband stalker/murderer he plays is a completely unmotivated and implausible character who bizarrely hijacks the film's final scenes for no apparent reason other than to make dramatic visual use of Le Tour Eiffel - after all, this is Paris, n'est pas? If Le Divorce had been a low-budget ex-Sundance project with a cast of no-names, I think it might have garnered a more appreciative following. It is nothing if not quirky, and it does offer some piquant cross-cultural humor and jabs at the privileged world of the arts(y). The plot also keeps us guessing where it will turn next, but one does have to wonder whether the director wasn't equally in the dark about that.

This is the worst movie i've ever seen in my life. Not only does the plot make no sense at all, Kate Hudson plays a dumb promiscuous woman who, instead of helping her recently divorced pregnant sister, spends all her time having an affair with an old pathetic man. It has no point. It tries to demonstrate how french people are despicable and arrogant, at the same time shows how Americans refuse to live in a culture which is different from theirs. It is described as a romantic comedy, but the whole movie is a complete tragedy. The beautiful Naomi Watts plays a women who is totally submissive and was no point to live. It had such a bad review in Brazil that it didn't even make it to the movies. It is probably one of the worst movies in these two ladies careers.